where words collide

Month: March 2016

When I close my eyes, I see my daughters’ faces, their eyes pleading with me to put an end to the self-destruction that’s been ruling my life. I lie in my bed in the fetal position, my limbs jerking uncontrollably. The fog is taking over, and I know that the real pain is inching closer with each passing moment. I drift in and out of sleep, in and out of the dreams that feel like reality but sadly are not.

I sit in the bottom of the shower, too weak to clean myself. I sit there and I cry, and the steady stream of warm water feels like God smiling upon me. I sit naked in the bottom of my shower, my hands folded together in prayer for the courage and strength to get through this once and for all.

I close my eyes and I see their faces. I know that it will undoubtedly get worse, but it will also get better. My only chance in life is to continue down this path until I reach complete sobriety, and to chase it each day with the determination that I possessed when I was actively using drugs.

Tonight I will lie down without the false security that drugs gave me, and I will be okay. I will continue to close my eyes and picture the faces of the people that I love, because that’s what life is truly about.

I’m writing my story now because I’m finally able to muster the courage to put everything out there. I type these words in the middle of the night because it’s all I can do to stay sane. I am writing my story because the love I once felt for drugs, the life I thought it had given me, has been tarnished. Our love affair has ended. Over time it has turned into hatred, bitterness, resentment, and so I write my story and hope that this glimpse into my existence isn’t lost on anyone. The scars have not yet faded, I have not healed, but each day is better than the last.

I allowed heroin to come into my life, to chew me up and to spit me out, to break me. I invited it in with open arms, knowing how things would end, but its charms I could not resist. Together we broke hearts. Together, though we could do anything, we hurt those that I love the most. We brought them unimaginable pain and worry, we fed them lies, we used them, manipulated them, until they could take no more.

There was a time when it would comfort me, when it would hold me in its warm arms and take away the pain I felt, but those days are far behind me. Now it only laughs in my face at the fool that I’ve become.

I’d always told myself that there was no greater anguish than that of the heroin addict, but I was wrong. The real torment is for those who love us. The deepest agony I’ve ever seen is not in the addicts I’ve known in my lifetime, but in the eyes of my own daughter, the tears spilling down her face with worry that her mother was going to die by her own hands.

I do not regret what I have done to myself. I will endure the sickness and the liver disease because these are the things that I deserve to feel, but my heart breaks each day for the ways in which I’ve harmed those that have always loved me. It’s for them that I keep going.

I will continue to document my journey as long as my fingers will let me. Every moment that passes gets easier. Though I may feel like I am dying, I’m really just coming back to life.

I’ve learned more about myself and about life and love in the past two months than I ever considered possible. It’s been a long road that I’ve been traveling along, and it’s time to go home.

It started with a bad decision. It seems as though all things in my life begin that way, but this particular choice would take me to a place that I wasn’t ready to go, to a place I thought I had long ago escaped. It would take me there, take everything from me, and then leave me lost, lonely, desperate, but I am not the victim.

I never was the victim. I was not the prey but the perpetrator. I am the black sheep and I am the wolf, baring my teeth to the world and sobbing in despair in the prison of solitude that I have created for myself.

It started with a bad decision, a desire that I gave into after years of pushing it away with all of my might. It was one of the most detrimental choices I’ve ever made, and I’ve made a lot of them in my 35 years on this planet. I went back, I gave in, I fell down, and I thought that I would never get back up again.

I went back to the place where it all began so many years ago. I went back for closure, for something new, for love. I went back with uncertainty and with hope, with fear and longing. I knew I should not have gone, but I went back.

I lied to everyone that I loved so that I could see him. I lied and they believed my stories, and I let the guilt pile up inside of me until that’s all there was. I became the kind of dishonest person that I’d always despised, the type of person that would do anything to get what they wanted. I was changing into someone I was ashamed of, someone I hated with all of my being but could not escape from. I was transforming into the person I used to be.

All of these years I thought that I would never get over him. I romanticized our relationship to the point that no one could ever be what he was to me. I knew that no one would love me the same way or make me feel the things that he did. And no one will because the love I thought we shared was a lie, a trick of the imagination that left a gaping void in my heart that nothing could fill.

The story goes on, as does life. Follow me as I shed this skin and become the person I am meant to be.